An Exiled Son of Santiago (Page 3)

"Everywhere, begin the remembering."
(from a mural by Francisco Letelier, Venice, California)

If Francisco manifests the artistic side of his father's personality, Juan Pablo has managed to follow in Orlando's political footsteps, becoming a key leader and strategist in his father's party. It has been a painful journey for Juan Pablo, who, like Francisco, wears his hair at shoulder length. The brothers are very close and, in fact, Francisco was in Chile partly to join Juan Pablo in a wilderness expedition in Chile's south. I learned more about Juan Pablo in an interview with the journalist Monica Gonzales, who consented to see me at the suggestion of Francisco. Gonzales is a torture victim and one of the few journalists to pursue the Pinochet investigation since the coup on Chile's September 11, in 1973.

Gonzales's emotions and tears cascaded freely across her face as she discussed the experience of evil in her small, crowded office at the weekly journal Siete + 7. I noticed during our discussion that Francisco was quiet. This was the first occasion they had met, and it appeared that Monica and he shared a bond across time and space, perhaps a familiarity grown from common grief. Monica said "it's finally time to talk about the people who are still alive, the living dead who never recover from torture but walk the streets, and the numbed children who never speak." She had contacted Juan Pablo when he returned to Chile in 1982 after graduate training in East Berlin and Mexico. Francisco would return one year later. The dictatorship was in power, but faltering. "I contacted Juan Pablo," Monica said, "because I wanted to find out what had happened to the sons of all those murdered fathers." They unexpectedly talked for six hours. Juan Pablo told her of sitting on a bench in Europe at Christmastime, shortly after his father's death. He was watching families celebrate the season inside their happy homes. He had hit bottom, could not speak. When he told Monica of this experience, she said, he cried, "enough for all his brothers. We both cried about the silenced crying of those years."

Francisco and his brothers were exiled three days after his birth in 1959. Orlando was fired from a research position in the copper industry for supporting Salvador Allende's unsuccessful campaign for the presidency. The Letelier family retreated to friendly Venezuela, and from there, Orlando made his way to the Inter-American Development Bank and American University in Washington, DC. Letelier was an intellectual, a singer, an artist and, only reluctantly, a politician and diplomat. The revolutionary times dictated his destiny. Maurice Zeitlin, now a UCLA sociology professor who in 1965 was a Ford Foundation researcher in Chile, recalls the fervor as Chileans excitedly experienced the rise of "a genuine, mass-based revolutionary left." Zeitlin recalls that "Allende was always the unifier, and he never wavered from the idea of a peaceful transition to socialism." The streets seemed perpetually filled with militant hope.

Like Luiz In´:cio Lula da Silva in Brazil a generation later, Allende ran four times before being elected in 1970 with a 36.2 percent plurality, including 75 percent of the working-class vote, and was confirmed as president by the Chilean Parliament. Zeitlin, whose daughter happened to date Francisco in his exile years, remembers passionate arguments in the 1960s over Chilean coffee in Santiago about the prospects of the "peaceful road." The Chileans he knew, many of whom became national leaders later, insisted that their country was "the England of Latin America," peaceful and constitutional. "They thought they were special," he recalls, even though there was the chilling example of the 1967 CIA-supported military coup in Greece, another nation claiming a democratic heritage. The deposed Greek leader Andreas Papandreou, Allende's counterpart, "wrote in his memoir that he had understood the possibility of a coup in his own country intellectually, but not emotionally," says Zeitlin. "In Greece, there were no safe houses, no contingencies to protect the leaders, and it was the same in Chile."

Orlando Letelier, a committed member of Allende's Popular Unity coalition, flew from Washington to Santiago after Allende's 1970 election, and offered his services. Orlando had unique leadership qualities, among them a sophisticated grasp of the complexities of American politics that was rare among Latin American revolutionaries. President Allende therefore sent Letelier back to Washington as Chile's new ambassador, where Isabel and the boys (Christian, 18, Jose, 17, Francisco, 17, and Juan Pablo, 16) adjusted to embassy life. Sheridan Circle, where Orlando soon would be killed, was their backyard. Francisco and Juan Pablo opened their first savings accounts at the Riggs bank. Their schoolmates included Donald Rumsfeld's daughter, Marcy, and James Baker's daughter Patricia. Even today, Francisco has a memento of an Easter egg hunt at the White House, signed "with warmest regards, Pat Nixon." The daughter of another Chilean official, Pascal Bonnefoy, who attended parties with Francisco, remembers the time as one when she lost the Spanish language "and almost was a gringa." Instead, Pascal would return eventually to Chile to become one of its most respected human rights investigators.

But beneath the diplomatic veneer, the wheels of destruction were turning. Declassified White House documents expose President Nixon ranting that he wanted to "smash that son of a bitch Allende" by a military coup or by "making the economy scream" or both. The International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) company was scheming with the CIA and White House to overthrow Allende. The Nixon government poured millions into El Mercurio, a savagely anti-Allende newspaper. Weapons and funds were passed by the CIA to plotters who eventually killed Defense Minister Gen. Rene Schneider, who was pledged to protect the legally elected Allende government.

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